


in my hand is a single dull pearl I cannot let go of

by sa00harine



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Arguing, Gen, I'm Sorry, Not Happy, Relationship Problems, Sad Ending, Will Graham Loves Hannibal Lecter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-15
Updated: 2021-03-15
Packaged: 2021-03-23 03:06:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30048960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sa00harine/pseuds/sa00harine
Summary: Molly shakes her head. “I don’t want anything from you,” she says earnestly. “I’m not trying to get inside your head or whatever.” If anything, the part of his past she had heard more of was his hatred for psychiatrists and journalists. “Whatever you’re holding, I’m telling you that you can put it down.”
Relationships: Molly Graham/Will Graham, Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 3
Kudos: 38





	in my hand is a single dull pearl I cannot let go of

**Author's Note:**

> so.. anybody order a sad Molly Graham-centric fic based on A Pearl by Mitski? no? well, here anyways

His smile drops the moment Wally retreats into his room. Molly notes the corners of his mouth, tugged down as fast as rain pattered to the ground. Heavier than rain, still. An avalanche. Cold, too. 

She purses her lips and takes a breath to speak. She doesn’t. Nothing she could say was ever enough. Molly had offered to listen when his head got like this- the kind of mental disturbance that would silence him for hours or days at a time and press just so that he was tense and short-tempered. Will never answered. At times, it was like holding out your heart and watching every raised hand lower down. 

Once upon a time, he’d been the man who she’d quite literally bumped into while walking her dog- an over energetic Australian Shepard named Toast, courtesy of Wally- that had taken a liking to Winston. She’d opened her mouth to apologize but his own had come first, spoken hurriedly and with eyes that wouldn’t quite meet her own. Molly had extended her hand, and they’d run into each other more often from then on, purposefully. When he’d asked her on a date, Molly had found that her usual resistance wasn’t there. He had bright eyes, blue and clear and the closest thing to a ‘window to the soul’ that they could get. 

Every window was closed to her and seeing that today in particular they were barred shut, wood and nails and all, Molly has to wonder if they’d ever been hers to open. 

She didn’t doubt his faithfulness, just how much of him she actually knew. He’d told her the articles were full of shit, and she was sure they were, but all the muck had to have come from somewhere, right? 

Molly crosses her arms. The movement draws his eyes to her. They’re all blue and nothing clear. Part of his mouth tries to smile and doesn’t succeed, held down firm by a force she can’t see. 

“Finish the motor you were working on?” She asks. He hates walking in circles but bluntly asking doesn’t seem to work either. 

Will shrugs with one shoulder. “It’s almost done. I was taking a break,” he says. Two dogs sit by his legs. He pets them both, one each hand. Winston and Bailey’s tails sweep across the floor contentedly. That was evidently to fend her off, but she’s growing sick of feeling him fade away. 

“Finish it tomorrow,” Molly prompts, staring at him evenly. 

Eyebrows raise and his mouth closes and opens around words he doesn’t say. Will closes it and reluctantly brushes past her to sit at the dining room table. A coffee mug from earlier in the day is still there. Will downs the rest left in there anyway. “You’re not gonna ask?” 

Molly mirrors his earlier shrug. “I was waiting to see if you’d tell me,” she admits, taking a seat across from him. Like this, it feels like an interrogation. She moves her chair so they’re diagonal instead. 

“I didn’t think you’d want to hear it.” 

She bites down a frustrated sound. “You only talk to me about it when I have to ask. And Will, it’s eating you up inside. Don’t think I don’t notice that most nights you lay awake without any sleep. Your hands are all bruised from taking this out on the motors,” she points out. 

Will opens one of his hands. True to her statement, they’re calloused and bruised in places. An odd look of derision crosses his face and he makes a fist. Molly lays her hand over it. He doesn’t move to intertwine their fingers. She tries to pretend that doesn’t hurt. 

“None of it’s you,” he says, at last. 

Molly wants to laugh. “I don’t know if I should be relieved or not.”

“I’m somewhere between ‘it’s not you, it’s me,’ and ‘or not.’” His voice is light but nothing else about him is. She sighs, heart sinking in her chest. 

“You’re having nightmares.” 

“I never really stopped.” 

Last night, when he’d lurched into waking, she’d been beside him. He’d waved off her comfort and offered to change the sheets. When she’d pressed a kiss to the scar across his forehead, Will had turned to the other side of the bed and pretended to fall asleep. She kept her eyes open, on the tense set of his shoulders, until that too had become indistinguishable from the darkness behind her eyes. 

A breath. “What are they about?” 

Will looks like he wants to run. “A battle. I can’t tell if walking away ever meant that it was over.” 

Stupid vague. Molly traces his knuckles with her thumb. His hand loses its stiffness. As she moves her fingers into the spaces between his, she examines his face and asks her next question. “Why do you think I’m asking?” 

“You’re curious,” Will answers. 

Molly shakes her head. “I don’t want anything from you,” she says earnestly. “I’m not trying to get inside your head or whatever.” If anything, the part of his past she had heard more of was his hatred for psychiatrists and journalists. “Whatever you’re holding, I’m telling you that you can put it down.” 

Will releases a breath and it comes out shaky. He looks down at their hands and squeezes hers. “I don’t know who I am without it.” His voice is softer. Air gliding through a window once it had been opened just enough. 

“Of course you don’t,” Molly replies. His eyes widen. “You weren’t given the choice to step away fully. You have reminders every day-” She leans across to cup his face, one finger brushing the scar on his forehead. “This one, and every other scar you like to pretend doesn’t exist when I ask about them.” 

Looking thoroughly caught, Will runs his free hand through his hair and then brings it over her hand on his face. “Bone saw,” he says simply. 

“Not a fishing incident,” Molly corrects, half playful. 

Will smiles sadly. “They’re all fishing incidents. I was trying to make myself both the fisherman and the bait.”

She can imagine, knowing the outline of it. At a point in time, he’d tried to carry out a plan between him and Jack all the while pretending to work with Hannibal Lecter by gaining his trust. It didn’t go according to plan, in the end. She knew the story behind that one, mainly because it was the one with enough coverage that he would make a fool of himself trying to lie about it. “What are you now?” 

“Still drowning, sometimes,” Will answers quickly, eyes moving from her to the dish towels behind her. “He had a bone saw. We were in Florence, Italy. The first time I’d seen him since-” Will blinks a handful of times. “He escaped.” The word settles thick like molasses. It caught in his throat for a moment. Oh, Will, she thinks to herself, but he didn’t escape you and you most definitely haven’t escaped him. “Eight months, or somewhere around that mark, since it happened.” 

“He-” She swallows, inspecting the thin white line across his forehead but not all the way across. “-Tried to slice into your head with a bone saw.” 

“To chew quite literally on what he’d only gotten to chew figuratively,” Will says, and she knows he’s quoting him. His face looks different- not a mask, but rather the removal of one. His articulation had changed.

Molly makes herself keep quiet. She doesn’t offer the pity she knew he’d hate- and she doesn’t feel pity, not as much as genuine care so strong it might have knocked her over. She realizes then why it was so loud. In an empty room a whisper could shatter the silence just as easily as a scream. And in this room, the sound was only her own. Will didn’t feel the same. 

His hand holds hers tighter anyways. It’s useless, the assurance that he’s here when his eyes are far away in Florence. “It was… strange,” Will says. “I was drugged as he did it. Jack Crawford sat across from me. He was screaming but I couldn’t hear a thing over the whirring noise. I couldn’t really see, either. I was just-” His mouth twitches. “-Staring. My vision was red. I felt blood soak through my shirt, wet the side of my face he was cutting into, and then the pressure of the blade.” Something flashes in his eyes. It’s so intense, a second’s worth of agony, hurt, and anger, that Molly involuntarily grips his hand more. 

“Disorienting?” She asks. About then. About now. 

Will considers that a moment. “No.” He pauses. “Fitting.” He looks stunned by the world and its truth before rushing to clarify. “We were supposed to have dinner. Picking up where we left off in-” Will looks at their hands joined together and then away. “-in Baltimore. The menu was all wrong last time so naturally he had to, in his eyes, right those wrongs. That just so happened to involve him dissecting the mind of someone he could never entirely predict in the first place. It was self-defense to him. I didn’t know what I was planning to do but I had a knife. He acted before I could, if I was even going to.” Will’s shoulders fall in defeat, surrendering to an enemy Molly wasn’t sure she wanted to meet. “He told me he wanted to show me Florence. Sometimes I think about what would have happened if I’d let him. If things have to end every way they can, why didn’t it end well for any of us?” He asks. 

It takes Molly yanking her hand back for Will to even realize his mistake. Towards the end of speaking he’d gotten distant. He blinks in that hurried way he does when he’s trying to process and then opens his mouth. 

“Molly..” 

She stands, question ringing in her ears. “This is a bad ending to you?” She asks. 

Will is slow to shake his head and that’s when her hands start to shake. “Molly,” he says. “It isn’t-” 

Maybe this reaction was what he was afraid of, she thinks to herself. She was scared too, then, if this is what it entailed. Was she only a distraction? 

She takes a breath more uneven than she wishes it to be. “I need you to tell me-” 

“No,” Will says immediately. “Molly, no.” The unspoken  _ that’s ridiculous  _ seems untrue if his own visible confusion is an indicator. 

“Do you wish you were in Florence? Or Baltimore?” 

Will breaks into an awful smile, then. It’s toothy like an animal that bites if backed too far into a corner and wild-eyed like something hungry. Starved. “I wish I could leave,” he says, and laughs painfully. 

Molly looks at him for a long time- the longer she does, the less she recognizes. “You left. You’re here,” she tries, and it comes out meek as the love she’d poured herself into starts to drain. 

He stares through her. “Part of me-” 

She lifts her jaw and cocks her head. “Part of you is with him?” 

She might as well have shot him. Will flinches and squeezes the back of his chair. “Part of him is with me,” he concludes, sounding cold. “And I can’t put it down.” 

The dogs whine. Will gets up to take them out. Molly stares at a chair that was the same regardless of Will sitting there or not. She thinks about what the windows of haunted houses have seen.

**Author's Note:**

> she should divorce him!!!


End file.
